When it comes to creating a strategic B2B content marketing strategy, you must incorporate different forms of content depending on what stage of the sales funnel your target audience is in.
Long-form and short-form content both serve different purposes and can push your audience through the sales funnel, transforming them from leads to buyers.
This article will go through long-form vs short-form content and decipher what they entail, why you should use them and most importantly, whether you’re using them in the right way.
We can define short-form content as content with a word count of up to 1,200 words.
This is great for quick reads that cover specific areas of certain topics, or shorter, informal pieces that involve less data and research.
For example, short-form content is perfect for:
- Blog Posts
- News Bulletins
- Drip Emails or Newsletters
- Infographics
- Social Media Posts
- Landing Pages
While you may not be able to include much depth in your short-form content, it can still have value from a content marketing perspective. Some of the advantages to short-form content include:
It’s a quick read, therefore, great for those who want quick answers and snappy information.
It gets straight to the point.
You can dive into niche areas and answer specific questions.
It’s easy to produce.
It tends to be mobile-friendly.
Of course, short-form content isn’t suitable for every situation. Some of the disadvantages of short-form content include:
- It’s much more difficult to cover a topic in-depth or complex subjects.
- Short-form content of the same format can become a little ‘samey’
- Short-form content can quickly become ‘yesterday’s news’. As it lacks depth, it’s likely to become outdated very quickly.
- Short-form content is also not as easy to repurpose as long-form content.
Think about social media content. It’s the perfect place for quick bursts of information that get viewers engaged and wanting more.
If you begin posting long content on social media, people will disengage from it. The best approach is to take snippets from long-form content, transform it into short-form content and publish that on social media platforms.
That way, if people are interested in what you have to say, you can lead them to the long-form content. If you bombard them with too much information at the start, they will never bother going through it.
Anything over 1,200 words would be considered long-form content. Like short-form content, it has its specific uses when creating a B2B content marketing strategy.
If you want to take the time and provide insightful and engaging content, then you might want to consider long-form pieces like these:
- Detailed blog posts or case studies
- White papers
- eBooks
- Pillar pages
- Guides and tutorials on complex subjects
Again, like short-form, long-form content has its benefits:
- It ranks better on search engines as it can contain stronger and more precise SEO keywords.
- It can cover more keywords – this includes a variety of long-tail keywords and short-tail keywords.
- It produces more backlinks.
- It can help improve your brand’s reputation as an industry expert and thought leader.
- It typically has a higher conversion rate.
With that in mind, there are drawbacks to long-form content, too:
It takes more time and research when writing.
It can’t be consumed quickly, or in passing, like short-form content – however this point highly rests on the readability. The use of headings, subheadings, bullet points and so on can help the reader digest and search for information easier.
It can be difficult to display on mobile devices – again this is subject to good design and structure. If your content is well designed and structured it improves readability on all devices.
Ideally, you should be using a mix of both.
A study from Backlinko argues that long-form content is much better for search rankings and backlinks, but attributing this high performance to word count alone is a mistake. One of the reasons why long-form content may be performing better could be due to the user's intent.
Many search engine queries are looking for information about a specific topic, so long-form content with detailed figures and insights is more likely to satisfy the user’s requirements.
In saying that, this does not dismiss all short-form content. For example, a landing page for a product or service would be better suited as short-form content as users are ready to purchase and do not need to be bombarded with information.
If you take a look at the content marketing sales funnel, you can see that there is room for both forms of content throughout each stage of the funnel.
These different forms of content help nurture leads and move them through the funnel, so that they can transform from viewers to buyers.
This stage is where people first become aware of your product or service.
Here short-form content is great for social media and getting your audience hooked to your brand.
Long-form content is brilliant for creating in-depth articles that shine a light on your brand's expertise.
These long-form content pieces can be backed by strong SEO keywords that get your articles ranking high on search engines.
This is where a person takes an interest in your product or services. They tend to become more invested in what you do as a company, so content such as case studies, drip email campaigns and newsletters come in handy.
Again, case studies can be written in-depth and portray the brilliant work your brand is doing. Content such as drip email campaigns and newsletters are often under 1200 words. Having a hefty word count on these pieces of content can lose your reader's attention.
This is the final stage when a person decides to buy from you. Here, you can continue conversations through emails, how-to guides, etc.
There is also a great mix of long-form and short-form content throughout this stage. How-to guides can be both long-form and short-form content and emails are better suited as short-form content.
In short, you should not let word count dictate your B2B content marketing strategy. Instead, you should let your content strategy dictate word count, using a mixture of different formats and lengths to perform different functions and explain different topics.
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